PLUCKED FROM THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18198, 19 March 1921, Page 10

PLUCKED FROM THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

THE IDEAL OF BIOLOGY. “The general result and ideal of biology is to deepen our wonder in the world, our love of beauty"; our joy in living. The modern botanist’’ (says the Nation) “is, in a very real sense more • aware of the Dryad in the tree than the Greek could be. Oiir point is that biology, by its revelation of the mystery, wonder, Ind beauty of life, its intricacy and subtlety, its’ history, -its tragedy and- comedy, approaches another aspect of the Idea of God. ‘lt is the Idea of God which Ijae been plucked from the Tree of ( Knowledge by men risen from the very dust of the earth.” Canon Barnes’s recent address to the British Association on “The Fall of ‘ The Fall of Man’ has been received with equanimity.!’ So far. as be can be aware of any occurrence outside the records of personal experience we know that the dogma of man living thousands of years ago in a golden age, in communion with the Divine, and falling from grace by disobedience tb the heavenly will, or, in other words, falling with a thud from the top of the evolutionary tree when he was still fumbling about at the roots, is theological moonshine. Man’s Fall To-day.— “The foil of civilised man to-day is probably more disastrous than any past tumble, because the height to which we have risen is correspondingly greater than all previous achievements, and the resultant demand upon us the more urgent. And the world rings with the loudness of this summons. “Consider the evolutionary advance of the evolutionary concept done since the days of its discovery. There can be no doubt that the Victorian misreading pf the Struggle for Existence has had a fatal repercussion upon the mental processes and, in consequence, the material well-being of modern man. But what a revolution of attitude has taken place during the last fifty years—a mutation of thought, as the biologists say. Variations, said the' Victorian,, are the’’- product of caprice, and we now realise that ‘chance is one of the most orderly phenomena in the universe.’

The New Knowledge.— “The older physicists explained the universe in terms of molecular energy, and interpreted the living creature as a physicochemical mechanism. We now know from the experiments of Jennings and the patient researches of Driesch, that not the meanest organism that waves its cilia in the waters but employs a force in its vital functions baffling every mechanistic formula. The . amoeba behaved; it _is capable of profiting by and registering the gains of experience, it ‘trades with time, and can learn by the ‘method of trial and error’ to reject and accept. ‘The living creature,’ we read in a book justly named ‘The Bible of Nature,’ ‘feeds and crows; it undergoes ceaseless change, yet has a marvellous power of retaining its integrity; it is not merely a’ self-stoking, self-repairing engine, but a self-reproducing machine; it has a self-regulative development ; it gives effective response to external stimuli; it profits by experience; it uses time; it co-ordinates its activities into unified behaviour, it. may be into intelligent deeds and rational conduct.’ The New Attitude.— “There is surely no discovery in this half-century of ' progress which so vindicates idealism and so unifies the rational and spiritual, approaches to the cosmic process as this recognition of the ‘individual and creative genius of the organism,’ of its entelechy as the autonomous agent of an organic imagination, and the studies of the Mendelists and Professors Batesdh, Poulton, Doncaster, etc., into the properties of the germ-plasm only strengthen the evidence. It is a deliverance from fatalism. These examples can be multiplied. “Huxlev painted nature as a ‘gladiatorial show,’ William James as a ‘harlot’ and ‘mere weather,’ but the moderns have swung over to the other side, not as artists and dreamers, but-investigators of facts, and we have Professor Bourne saying “This fratricidal ’war is not so evident—a doubt whether it exists to any great extent—in the animal world.’ Practice Mutual Aid. “The Darwinians defined competition as the rule of natural life; the modern zoologist listens to Kropotkin’s : ‘That is the watchword that comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. “Therefore combine practice mutual aid!” ’ The new knowledge that man has conquered, the world not Dy brute force, but bV mental evolution, and that altruism (as Herbert Spencer in his day cried to deaf ears) is an integral and increasing part of the order of nature, is a further example. Before this wonderful turnover of opinion, accomplished in so short a period and derived front quarters used to treating sentiment as an irrational bogey, we nee<| feel no" surprise at Professor Murhead’s statement that:— “ ‘lt is not too much to say that religion in the wider sense of the word exercises a stronger hold on the mind of the civilised world to-day than it has done at any period since the Reformation.' How to Rise. "It seems, then, that coincident with the fall of civilised nfan we have a renaissance of civilised thought, and that we are more advanced in our knowledge of how to rise with the universe at our backs at the period of our fall than we were in our Victorian altitudes. We have E roved the world arid found it good; we ave gained an incalculable experience in utilising its resources for the welfare of humanity • we have asked and received a natural sanction to better our lot, and we can no longer plead ignorance in the methods of opening this great reservoir of knowledge to irrigate all our moral and physical: deserts.

“Nor lire there really formidable obstacles to putting our faith and our wisdom to practical testa. We appear to forget that if Canon Barnes had thrown the Pall of Man to the formalists 600 years ago (a toddle in the evolutionary journey), he would have been burned at Smithfleld, with Mr Chesterton dancing round the flames, Both theology and science have come through into the century with broken Jbones but cleared heads and mended hearts, and there is nothing to bind them. Christianity is Necessary. ‘‘And on the negative side, we have repeated and clamant signs (the omens and portents of an older world) that the ‘gathering darkness of tho frown of God’ is not a picturesque phrase, that Christianity is a practical and necessary experiment in government, and that man shall not live by bread alone, or he shall not have even half a loaf. The repudiation of our brutality, greed, anjd stupidity comes not in whispers but shouts,